Chapter 4: Ex Machina

Chapter 4: Ex Machina

CHAPTER 4

EX MACHINA

Trying to overturn death was taboo. That was something he thought he’d learned already on the day he’d tried to resurrect his mother. His failure had resulted in a part of her being lost forever. A child longing for his mother was a natural emotion for humans. And lamenting someone’s death came just as naturally.

But if a child were to attempt to resurrect their dead mother, then it would be the act of a monster or a madman. That was something he could never know for as long as it went unsaid. And even once the words were spoken, he couldn’t, from the bottom of his heart, fathom what was so horrible about it. It likely meant that he was a monster, devoid of rationality.

And he should have known it by now.

The indignation and pity in his father’s eyes as he bore witness to the dissected body of his wife, and his child who had done the dissecting. The strength of his brother’s embrace as he wordlessly hugged that child, who stood stock-still.

And the tears of his milk sister, who clung to him as she wept bitterly.

So he may not have understood, but he did learn that lesson and make that oath. That was a sin. A sin that filled his precious father, brother, and her with sorrow. So never again would he try to defy the border separating the living from the dead…

However.

“Vika… Hey… Are you okay…?”

That same girl now lay before him, crushed beneath rubble.

“…Lerche.”

The words spilling from his lips without regard for his will felt as if they were spoken with someone else’s voice. His throat was parched, suffocated by the mineral dust in the air. A shell’s explosion had smashed a slab of concrete and made it crumble over the frontline base, covering half the room. It was the result of a direct hit from a Skorpion’s 155 mm shell, which had enough firepower to reduce both a Barushka Matushka and a fortified concrete bunker to bits.

She was crushed under a piece of rubble that was taller than his then-ten-year-old self, as if someone had attempted to cut her in half right across her midsection. A raw, unfamiliar stench tickled his nostrils, which had only known the sterilized scent of the palace until now. A sticky substance oozed from beneath the rubble—blood.

Even as she was tormented by the unimaginable pain radiating from her lower half, her pallid pure-white face and her bloodied red lips contorted into an earnest smile.

“Thank goodness.”

“…Why…?”

He instantly regretted that his question unintentionally overlapped with her statement. Those were her final words. They couldn’t be interrupted or missed. But he couldn’t stop the words from leaving his lips.

“Why did you protect me…? I’m the one who should’ve been crushed under this rubble…!”

Lerche was lying buried at the spot where he’d stood moments before the collapse. He knew—he couldn’t help but know—that she’d pushed him out of the way. Was it because he was royalty? Because it was decided that he’d be her master? Did she really throw her precious life away, clinging to such a stupid reason…?

“What do you mean, ‘why’…?”

Tilting her head, Lerche smiled painfully. As if wondering how he hadn’t realized it already.

“You’re the most important person in my life, Vika…”

“…!”

The girl who had been chosen to serve at his side for the rest of her life soon after she’d been born. From the moment her mother became his wet nurse, her life had already been sold off. Any loyalty, any emotion she harbored for him was merely propped up to support that. She must have known.

But Lerche smiled. Without regard for anyone’s intentions, her eyes unfocused from the blood loss, as if she were dreaming.

“You know, Vika, I may be a serf, but I love this country. I love this country’s long winters and sparkling springs, summers, and autumns. This is the place where I was born, you know? It’s where I lived with you until today.

“So please…,” Lerche said, looking up at him with dreamy eyes that were unable to discern him—or anything else—any longer.

“…keep protecting it. Keep protecting our homeland.”

“…I will.”

What other answer could he have given? He himself may have loved the country’s seasons, but he felt no lingering attachment to it. He had no sense of pride or belonging to the country he was born and raised in. Yet the girl dying in front of him, the girl who was his classmate, his childhood friend, his milk sister… The girl who stayed by his side even as people said she was merely the Serpent of Shackles’ plaything.

She was always with him. Such a thing was second nature. And he’d never thought he would lose her.

“I promise. I’ll protect this country and its people… So…”

Faced with a loss that couldn’t be reversed, he was terrified for the first time in his life. Being left behind scared him so much more than her death, and that selfishness, the coldness of his own heart, made him shudder with fright.

It was then that he realized that without a doubt, he was not human after all, but a coldhearted, man-eating viper. And he couldn’t help but long for it—to repeat the mistake he had forbade himself from ever making again.

“So, Lerche… Would you stay by my side from today on?”

Don’t leave me behind.

Lerche’s eyes widened for a moment. If there was even a hint, a trace of hesitance or fear in her eyes, he may have given it all up. But the loyal girl nodded. She bore her own corpse before him, accepting his all-too-selfish request to allow him to make her into the living dead with a smile.

“I will…”

My lonely Prince Charming.

Those were her final words.

When Vika awoke from his nap, he was greeted by the usual sight of the thick concrete walls that distorted one’s sense of time. He’d gotten used to this faint darkness teeming with silhouettes clad in the United Kingdom’s purple and black, the Federacy’s steel blue, and the Republic’s Prussian-blue uniforms over the last three days. The air, stuffy from the minimal ventilation, was thick with an atmosphere of exhaustion.

It’d been three days since the siege had begun, and they were nearing the end of their rope. Perhaps owing to the odd dream he’d had, Vika sighed lightly.

He was presently in a frontline base’s pillbox, just as he’d been in back then—albeit that one had been much smaller in scale and much worse equipped than this one. The United Kingdom was a militaristic country, and the Idinarohk line stood at its peak. They served as vanguards on the battlefield, and they always stood at the front lines to learn how to do so.

And it all happened when, abiding by that custom, he was sent to the southern front. Vika wasn’t being shunned in particular. Everyone, with the exception of the king and the heir first in line for the throne, was equally sent to war. And so his uncle, the royal prince; one of Vika’s elder brothers, who was also a prince; Vika’s sister, a princess who was five years his senior; and one of his cousins, who was also a princess, had all died in battle.

He’d slept by resting his back against the wall, which had made his body stiff, so he rose to his feet to stretch. He really did hate these kinds of dark, cramped spaces.

It reminded him of when she’d died.

“Lerche.”

With his throat still dry with traces of the dream, he whispered the name. To connect himself to the quasi-nerve crystal attached to the girl resurrected in her image. It had been placed within the girl’s body, behind the neck. Where no one would be able to remove it.

So he would never have to let go of her again.

“Are you listening, Lerche?”

Her immediate response came through the Resonance.

“Of course, Your Highness… Your orders?”

The Sirins never slept. They might power down for the sake of having their precision mechanisms tuned or for maintenance, but it was different from a living being’s slumber. Their artificial brains did not build up the chemicals that caused fatigue, and they did not require sleep to organize their memories.

Simply put, they weren’t human.

“Give your report first. What’s your status out there?”

“We have little remaining ammunition and energy packs. We’ve lost forty percent of our Alkonosts. The Juggernauts haven’t suffered as many losses, but…the Processors are nearing their limits.”

“Naturally. The attacking side gets depleted first during a siege. In terms of both manpower and supplies.”

This sort of battlefield was rigged against the attacking side. The defending castle had lodging facilities and defensive measures on its side, while they had to sleep out in the cold, open air. Modern tech may have made sleeping outside a bit easier, but they still had to spend three days in a snowy battlefield they were unfamiliar with.

“What about the Legion reinforcements’ position? How far did they get according to Nouzen’s recon?”

“As of sunset yesterday, they’ve reached the phase line Lark and stopped there.”

“Their getting as far as Lark was within predictions… But I suppose I must take my hat off to the Federacy’s Vargus. They’re holding on well.”

“By your will… Also…”

Lerche seemed hesitant to continue speaking.

“…Nouzen’s fatigue is the most worrisome of all, I believe. To think he cannot turn a deaf ear to the wailing of the dead even in his sleep… Though he hasn’t said anything, I do wonder if our presence causes him additional strain.”

If this goes on for much longer, he just might break.

Vika nodded, picking up on the implied concern in her voice.

“We may have to think of some countermeasure when it comes to deploying you during cooperation with the Eighty-Six… I’ll ask him myself after this is all over.”

Vika realized that it was no wonder Lena was so anxious. Because of the strain, that headless Reaper had lost his ability to discern whether he was hurting. Shin had no desire to make others cry but lacked the understanding of what made them cry in the first place.

“Our side’s scarce on ammo, too. We’ve told the rescue force to hurry, but it’ll still take them time… We’re at our limit.”

Today and right now would be the watershed. All that remained was to push in and crush the enemy. Thankfully, the enemy’s guns were sufficiently exhausted to allow for that.

“We need to finish this. Show them your duty and dignity.”

Lerche seemingly smiled.

“By your will… Your Majesty?”

“Hmm?”

“Please do take care. I will be by your side soon enough.”

Vika’s eyes widened for a moment. Cutting the Sensory Resonance, he looked up and smiled wordlessly. All that he saw was the gloomy artificial ceiling. And though the girl wasn’t beyond it…

“Just where did you learn that one, you blasted seven-year-old?”

He’d never had Lerche go through the process of having her memories wiped. That procedure had been added only when the Sirins went into mass production, after a handful of prototype Sirins had been produced. If a human consciousness was placed inside another body with the memories of its final moments intact, it would collapse and never start up again, so the procedure was implemented only after that became clear.

Lerche had never undergone the procedure, because it hadn’t existed at the time, but the consciousness and memories from when she was alive hadn’t remained in her to begin with. At first, Vika had been terribly disappointed and had despaired… At the same time, he’d been just the slightest bit relieved.

Because he was also deathly afraid. What if she were to complain—to tell him she actually didn’t want to be confined like this? That she had no memories, not a trace of her old personality…that even her manner of speech was entirely different from what he once knew, was a blessing for him.

At times he thought maybe she actually did remember everything, but despite that, she still changed her tone and mannerisms. All so Vika wouldn’t remain bound by her memory. So that this time, he could truly use and break her, like a tool.

Because his milk sister was that much of a worrisome girl. Meddlesome to the point of foolishness.

“…Lerchenlied.”

This world isn’t the least bit beautiful anymore. Spring will likely never come to a world without you. Still… You wished for me to defend it. And for as long as I remember that, I feel like I can still meet you.

“I will fulfill that promise… Now…and as many times as it takes.”

“Sir Reaper.”

He knew it was her. But hearing the wailing of a ghost so nearby still made Shin rather uncomfortable. They were in the container that served as their conference room. Shin was rearranging the Legion’s organization, which had changed somewhat overnight, on the operation map, raising his head only to face Lerche.

“A fine morning to you. I was just thinking of coming to wake you up.”

“What happened?”

He’d noticed only after saying it and clicked his tongue. They were on the battlefield, and it was the morning of a battle. It was only natural to be wary of anything unusual, but his voice was thornier than he’d intended—fighting for these three days had put him more on edge than he’d realized.

“…Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

Lerche shook her head gently. There was no trace of exhaustion about her, and she continued speaking with her usual snow-white face.

“This is true for all of you, however…you seem especially tired. Your face is quite pale.”

“Yeah…”

He’d thought he was used to it, but being exposed to the incessant screams of the Legion at all hours of the day was wearing him down. Adding that to the cold, the frustration from the fruitless skirmishes, and the ever-approaching time limit…it was a small wonder that he’d woken up sooner than expected.

“The human body truly is an inconvenient thing. You cannot function without sleep, cannot move without eating, and can die if you lose so much as a single limb. It’s as if you were made unfit for battle. No… Perhaps it would be more apt to say that war has left humankind behind.”

To begin with, war and loss of life went hand in hand. The deafening roar of cannon fire, the severe oscillations and heat emanated by tanks and Feldreß, and though they were no longer in use, the supersonic speed of the fighter jet—as humankind sought to gain further armor, destructive power, and speed to enable those machines to destroy each other more efficiently, weapons had gradually changed into things that harmed their wielders.

Lerche spoke from a mechanical body that could feel no pain, that knew no slumber or hunger, that could fight even after losing limbs so long as its propulsion system and central processor remained intact.

“Shouldn’t you have entrusted war to us a long time ago?”

Shin regarded Lerche with a fleeting glance. So humans had become nothing more than a burden for their weapons. Was that the way of it? What limited a manned weapon’s mobility was the brittle human body inside it. The need to include a cockpit increased its weight and size. And if taken to an extreme, with the exception of their nervous systems, humans were just sacks of fluid that weighed an extra several dozen kilograms. And the brains that operated those nervous systems would grow dull with fear and exhaustion. As weapons, they were utterly defective.

Yet still…

“We would be…no better than the Republic.”

Lerche blinked slowly, with the movements of a windup doll that didn’t understand what it had just been told.

“We truly aren’t human in any way.”

“I don’t mean that. Whether what sits inside a weapon is human or not has nothing to do with it. Shoving all the fighting onto someone else and fleeing the battlefield, throwing away the strength and will to fight, putting your fate in someone else’s hands. That’s just…pathetic.”

That was their source of pride as Eighty-Six and what set them apart the most from the “white pigs.” It wasn’t the color of their hair or eyes but their way of life. Living on the battlefield with nowhere to run, relying only on one’s own body and one’s own comrades. Deciding to never put one’s fate in the hands of another. That was what made the Eighty-Six who they were. It was their proof of being.

Lerche suddenly giggled.

“…Pathetic?”

And the tone of her laughter was clearly…mocking.

Shin reflexively glared back at Lerche, who raised her chin and laughed. As chuckles escaped her throat, she squinted her eyes, but not out of laughter.